Telestream Switch 4: your QuickTime Player Pro 7 replacement

RedShark Review: Once Apple pulled the plug on QuickTime Player Pro 7, the industry started to look elsewhere for a media tool for the proper playback, inspection and encoding of media files. For many, that new multipurpose application has become Telestream’s Switch.

Now in version 4, Telestream offers a range of desktop and enterprise media solutions, including Vantage, ScreenFlow, Flip4Mac, Episode (now end-of-life) and others. Switch fills the role of a media player with added post-production capabilities, going far beyond other players, such as QuickTime Player or VLC.

Switch is offered in three versions: the basic Switch Player ($9.99), Switch Plus ($199) and Switch Pro ($499). Pricing for Plus and Pro covers the first year of support, which includes upgrades and assistance. There is also a free demo version with watermarking. All versions are available for both macOS (10.11-13) and Windows (7-10).

Playback support

The first attraction to Switch is its wide support of “consumer”, broadcast and professional media formats and codecs. For Mac users, some of these are supported in QuickTime Player too but require a conversion step before you can play them. Not so with Switch. Of particular importance to editors will be the MPEG-2 and MXF variations. Some formats do require an upgrade to at least the Plus version, so check Telestream’s tech specs for specifics.

One area where Switch shines is file inspection. This has made it to the go-to quality assurance tool at many facilities. File metadata is exposed, along with proper display and reporting of interlaced video. It supports JKL transport control and frame advance, using the arrow keys. Since closed captioning is important for all terrestrial and set-top channel broadcasters, you must have a way to check embedded captions. In the case of QuickTime Player, it will only display a single track of embedded captions and then only the lower track. So, for example, if you have a file with both English and Spanish captions on CC1 and CC3, QuickTime Player will only display the English captions and not even let you verify that more captions are present. With Switch Plus and Pro, the full range of embedded channels are presented and you have the ability to do a check on any of the caption tracks.

Switch Plus likely covers the needs of most users, but Pro adds additional functionality, such as metering for multi-channel audio and loudness compliance. Pro also lets you open up to 16 different files for comparison. It is the only version that supports external monitoring through Blackmagic Design or AJA i/o hardware. Finally, Pro lets you QC DPP (Digital Production Partnership) files from the desktop and display AS-11 MXF metadata.

Content encoding

Beyond these powerful player and inspection functions, Switch Plus and Pro are also full-fledged media encoders. You can change metadata, reorder audio channels and export a new media file in various formats. Files can be trimmed, cropped and/or resized in the export. Do you have a ProRes master file and need to generate an MPEG-2 Transport Stream file for broadcast? No problem.

I had a situation where I received a closed caption master file of a commercial from the captioning facility. It needed to have the ends of the file (slate and black) trimmed to meet the delivery specs. Normally when you edit or convert a file with embedded captioning, it will break the captions on the new file. Not so with Switch. I simply set the in and out points, set my encode specs to video pass-through and generated the new file. The encode (essentially a file copy in this case) was lightning fast and the captions stayed intact.

Switch Plus and Pro include publishing presets for Vimeo, YouTube and Facebook. In addition, the Pro version also lets you create an iTunes Store package, necessary to be compliant when distributing via the iTunes Store. Switch is a cross-platform application, but ProRes encoding support is limited to the Mac version. However, the iTunes Store package feature is the exception. ProRes asset creation is available to Windows users when creating the .itms files used by the iTunes Store.

Although Switch Plus or Pro might seem pricy to some when they compare these to Apple Compressor or Adobe Media Encoder. However, the other encoders can’t do the precision media functions that Switch offers. Telestream has built Switch to be an industrial-grade media tool that covers a host of needs in a package that’s easy for anyone to understand. If you liked QuickTime Player Pro 7, then Switch has become its 21st century successor.

Oliver Peters is a veteran editor, colorist, and post production consultant. He is also a contributor to various industry publications writing about production and technology topics. He may be contacted through his website at oliverpeters.com